


(Love Is) A Rollercoaster Ride

by roseandheather



Series: Bittersweet And Strange [32]
Category: Inspector Lynley - All Media Types, Inspector Lynley Mysteries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-25
Updated: 2011-08-24
Packaged: 2017-10-23 01:16:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseandheather/pseuds/roseandheather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chapter 1: Five things about Barbara Havers that drive Thomas Lynley to his wits' end, and one thing that makes it all worthwhile.</p><p>Chapter 2: Five things about Thomas Lynley that drive Barbara Havers barking mad, and one thing that makes it all worthwhile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**_1.  She puts catsup on her steak._ **

It really is the darndest thing.

Oh, she never does it in public. But when they’re at home having steak for dinner – on the rare occasions dinner isn’t take-away in the car on the way to a crime scene, and one of them has thought ahead enough to buy steak in the first place – she _always_ has to put catsup on it.

“The point of steak,” he informs her one evening as she’s vigorously shaking the bottle, “is to enjoy its flavor. _Not_ to smother it in artificial tomato paste!”

“That ‘artificial tomato paste’,” she retorts, gulping her tea, “is a food group, just like chocolate and take-away, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.”

He eventually manages to switch her to an American foodstuff known as A1 – what it stands for will ever be a mystery – but late at night, when she can’t sleep and heads down to the den to watch crappy reruns, he will still occasionally find her curled under her old fleece blanket, eating leftover steak smothered in catsup.

 

 **_2.  Her feet are always freezing._ **

It doesn’t seem to matter how many pairs of thick wool socks she wears, how many heating pads she sticks under the sheets or how many times she soaks her feet in a tub of hot water.

Her feet remain what Lynley has dubbed “footsicles.”

Eventually she resorts to tucking them between Lynley’s calves at night, because she doesn’t know how else to stop them from trembling with cold in the middle of the night.

He hates it, of course – no sane person _would_ be fond of foot-shaped blocks of ice interrupting the otherwise lovely cocoon of warmth they bury themselves in after a hard case – but he lets her, because he’s seen the shivering and the socks and the heating pads and the hot water, and a little discomfort on his part is a small price to pay if it warms her poor feet up.

When they find out later that her feet are always so cold because of some circulatory something-or-other that was damaged when she was shot, he waits until the doctor leaves the room before he buries his face against her shoulder and holds her as close as he can manage.

She soothes him as best she can, but nothing she says can stem the litany of “I’m so sorry”s and “I should have protected you”s that etch into her skin where he whispers them.

That night when they get home and crawl into bed, he traps her feet between his calves, and when she tries to tug them away, he just grips them tighter.

And if she notices the tears that dampen her hair that night, she never lets on.

 

 **_3.  She refuses to ditch those baggy sweaters._ **

He had never understood those sweaters. He understood them even less the first time he made love with her, when he discovered the marvelous, tiny waist and trim body she hid under oversized flannel.

“I like my sweaters. They’re comfy,” is all she will say as she wraps herself tighter in her old fleece blanket and continues to browse case files.

“Barbara, you’re a beautiful woman. There’s no reason for you to hide that.”

“No, I’m not. Cute, maybe. And what makes you think you’re objective? You’re in love with me, for God’s sake! Of course you think I’m beautiful. That doesn’t mean I actually am.”

So he waits until Christmas, until the Christmas Ball when she has to wear a dress. They fight about it – she wants to wear some sort of plain, long-sleeved thing that makes her look like a nun, and he absolutely will not have it. So he does the cruelest thing he can think of: he sics Judith and his mother on her.

He regrets it two weeks later when she descends the stairs in a fantasy of deep violet silk that makes her green eyes glow and hugs her tiny waist like a glove.

And really, the laughter that lights up her eyes when the champagne flute slips from his fingers to shatter on the floor is quite uncalled-for.

Needless to say, he lets her keep wearing the sweaters after that – encourages it, in fact – because as far as he’s concerned, what happens in Cornwall stays in Cornwall, and the less people see of how she _really_ looks, the better. It cuts down on the number of people he’d have to kill for looking at her like that.

And besides, he got her to grudgingly admit that maybe she’s not a complete hag, and he’ll take his victories where he can get them, because with Barbara, they come few and far between.

 

 **_4.  She rides like she was born for it._ **

The first time he takes her riding, she makes a show of bouncing about in the saddle like the rookie he expects her to be. Then, five minutes in, she lets out a ringing laugh, digs her heels down, nudges Dancer in the flank and gallops away, leaving him choking on her dust as she simply floats over the Cornish hillside as though she and the horse were two halves of one whole.

Considering it had taken a year of twice-weekly lessons before he was let off the longe line, let alone allowed to gallop about, he’s a bit dismayed and more than slightly put out.

They spend the rest of the day riding around the estate, sometimes racing, sometimes just walking quietly. On horseback she looks relaxed, at ease, like this is one thing she knows how to do. He notices, once, that as they fly across the fields she ditches her stirrups completely, crossing them up in front of her pommel and all but gluing her calves to Dancer’s side. The mare responds immediately; when Barbara gives her her head she takes five swift strides and jumps the three-foot wall in front of her with absurd ease. And Barbara – far from looking frightened or out of control, she bends low over Dancer’s neck, her red hair blending perfectly into the horse’s shining chestnut mane, as she releases over the crest and gallops away from the fence, laughing with glee. He thinks, suddenly, how _good_ it must feel, for her to find one part of his life that she apparently understands; he’s drug her into a world she’s disdained all her life, a world that, more often than not, makes her nervous and uncomfortable, and he can’t help but marvel, yet again, that she’d put up with all of that just for him.

“You said you’d never ridden before!” he accuses her as they put away their tack after their ride.

“You mean I forgot to mention the scrubby little ponies on my uncle’s farm? The ones I’d throw a halter and pair of reins on before I galloped off to jump whatever logs and streams I could find – bareback, since we didn’t have saddles or bridles? I didn’t get to go often, but when I did… Well you wouldn’t think that was proper riding, would you, since we didn’t have your fancy tack or training?”

He stares at her for a long moment, growls and tackles her into the nearest haystack.

They don’t come out for over an hour.

 

 **_5.  She not only watches soap operas, she loves them._ **

He comes bolting down the stairs when he hears her screaming.

“ _Oh my God!”_

What he finds when he enters the den is Barbara intently focused on the telly, the shattered remains of a beer bottle lying against the baseboard.

“Ah, Barbara?”

“Stacey killed Archie! _Stacey!”_

What he manages to divine, after an hour of listening to Barbara rant, is that this Stacey person is a character on the television show _EastEnders_ , and that she had killed another character, one Archie Mitchell, who by all accounts was a piece of scum. He could _not_ divine how she felt about it, as her opinion seemed to change with every breath she took.

The only consistent opinion he managed to get out of her was an outraged, “And detectives _do not work that way!”_

He tries to avoid her on “soap nights” after that, eliminating anything breakable from the den and leaving her to her shows in peace.

It’s not until the “trolley crash” storyline on _Coronation Street_ (or, as she calls it, _Corrie_ ) that he finds himself watching the episodes with her, and though he still can’t make hide nor hair of the storylines, he finds himself increasingly mesmerized by the way she reacts to the characters, sharing their joys and sorrows with the same fervor and passion she does everything in her life.

And okay, so maybe “soap nights” aren’t so bad anymore, what with her curling against him, tucked under his arm, and squeezing his hand in fear when some impossibly melodramatic revelation is made as though it’s of earth-shattering importance.

But he still clears everything breakable out of the den.

 

 **_+1. She always tucks herself against his side when she sleeps, as though saying, “You’ll protect me. I trust you.”_ **

Thomas Lynley has seen Barbara Lynley (née Havers) in every conceivable state. He’s seen her in a blind rage, he’s seen her so giddy she’s bouncing, he’s seen her intent on a case and coolly logical and fiercely protective and lost in the throes of desire.

But she’s never so beautiful, he thinks, as when she sleeps.

He knows she has trust issues. Everyone up to this point in her life has hurt her; why should he be any different? She’s always insistent on standing on her own two feet. He can think of maybe a handful of times she’s allowed him to comfort her in the presence of others, and even fewer when she’s allowed him to carry her. And although she trusts him completely, both on the job and off, most of the time he gets the sense that while she trusts him to have her back the way she has his, she doesn’t yet trust him to carry her.

Except when she sleeps.

When she sleeps, she tucks her head into the curve of his shoulder, slides her feet between his calves, and curls into his side beneath his encircling arm, as though burying herself in her own cocoon of safety. In his arms, she trusts him with the most vulnerable parts of her – the night terrors, the cold feet, the inevitable amplification of emotions that occurs at night.

“I trust you,” she says when she slips her poor, cold feet between his calves.

“You’ll protect me,” she says when she drops all her defensive walls as soon as his arms come around her.

“I need you,” she says when she grabs for his free hand after she wakes, sweaty and shaking, from the throes of yet another nightmare.

So really, it’s no wonder that when he looks at her sleeping, peaceful face, he thinks about all the little quirks that drive him batty – the catsup, the baggy sweaters, the cold feet, her little stunt with the horses, the soap operas – and thinks, _no, I didn’t fall in love with her in spite of all that. I fell in love with her because of all that._

And even if her quirks still occasionally make him crazy, when he looks at her, a sleeping angel in the moonlight, he doesn’t even have to think about whether or not it’s all worth it, because he already knows.


	2. Chapter 2

**_1.  He has an annoying talent for turning her into a gooey-eyed dope at the drop of a hat._ **

Barbara Lynley has never been one to display her feelings openly. Oh, she’ll rail at her partner for this and furiously tell him why he shouldn’t do that, but she thinks it’s a show of weakness for her to display just how disgustingly gooey-eyed she really is over the man she’s worked with for over ten years.

But ever since he bullied Hillier into letting them get married whilst remaining partners – she has yet to figure out just what he said to the poor man, anyway – he’s seemingly made a point of carelessly tossing around phrases engineered to make her knees go weak out of the blue.

It all starts right after they get married, when some arsewipe of a constable makes the mistake of implying that she was only reinstated after the North Sea debacle because she was sleeping with Lynley at the time.

She expects Lynley to come leaping to her defense. What she does _not_ expect are the next words that come flying out of his mouth.

“ _My sergeant_ is the finest detective I have ever had the privilege to work with, and if your head wasn’t so far up your arse you’re looking out your own throat, you would be well aware of that fact! The _only_ reason she didn’t make Inspector years ago was because she _expressly asked_ to remain a Sergeant so she could remain my partner, and a greater honor I have never been given in my life! She has more talent for this job in her fingernails than you could ever hope to have, and if you ever insult her again, your body will never be found, by this or any police force! And as to whether or not she was sleeping with me at the time – no she was not, because I was too much an imbecile to see what was right in front of my nose! And even if I had been man enough to take hold of the best thing that would ever happen in my life, she would never under any circumstances use that to further her career – not that she would _need_ to do so, mind you – because she is a far better person than you could ever hope to be! Now _get out._ ” The last words are delivered with such seething hatred the entire bullpen cowers.

Barbara, meanwhile, is staring at him in utter astonishment with a look of such naked adoration on her face, the rest of the squad ducks their heads and rather embarrassedly pretend they don’t exist.

And if she has to use the wall behind her to hold her up because her knees have suddenly turned to jelly, well, no one but Lynley notices.

The kicker? Three days later, Hillier calls them in and tells them he _can_ promote her to Inspector _and_ keep them together, after all.

She just looks at her partner before they erupt in a fit of hysterical laughter.

 

 **_2.  He likes to win arguments by kissing her into oblivion._ **

Winning arguments gets quite a bit harder after they get together.

She first discovers this when she’s detailing a long and, if she does say so herself, well-thought-out theory on why the bastard son could not _possibly_ be his uncle’s best friend’s killer.

Lynley, showing a surprising amount of improvisational ability, yanks her into the first empty storage closet he comes across, flips on the base lights and lays a kiss on her that – there is no other way to put it – makes her body _sing,_ turning her knees to butter and wiping her mind blissfully blank of any form of thought whatsoever. Later, she’s not even sure he left behind the capacity for necessary functions like breathing and regular heartbeats.

The long and the short of it is, by the time she remembers that intricately detailed argument, the bastard son is in custody and bellowing for a lawyer, and Nkata is telling them that they’ve cracked the case and it was actually the uncle who’d killed his best friend because the best friend wanted the uncle’s wife. Any other family drama was, as the Americans would say, gravy.

It’s almost worth the look on Lynley’s face when he realizes she’d been telling him the exact same thing hours earlier, but that doesn’t stop him from using the tactic at every opportunity.

She only wishes it didn’t work so well.

 

 **_3\. The pleasure of a night of crappy beer, trashy telly and take-away chicken marsala is completely lost on him._ **

“And what, exactly, is the point of this exercise?” he asks her as they settle down on the couch with their takeaway and beer to enjoy (or suffer through, in Lynley’s case) the latest episode of _CSI: Miami_ on Channel Four.

She sighs – the same sort of long-suffering sigh he’s heard from her on any number of occasions – and states calmly, “The _point_ is to forget about reality for as long as possible and enjoy a world where the bad guy is always caught at the end of the episode – or two, if the showrunners want to be particularly cruel – and one man is capable of providing justice for a city of millions.”

So Lynley resolves to give it a try.

He lasts all of two minutes before he starts muttering in her ear about everything the show does wrong. Then he supplements it with all the reasons Horatio Caine could not possibly have figured out who the killer is that fast and all the reasons the head of a forensics team would never be the primary detective on a case of any sort, let alone a murder case.

She rounds on him during the commercials and delivers a rousing speech on the similarities between _CSI: Miami_ and Lynley’s beloved P.G. Wodehouse novels and her own battered Agatha Christie paperbacks. Lynley, stunned into silence by her extensive knowledge of Wodehouse canon, mutely nods and turns back to the show.

She wisely says nothing the next week when he shows up in the den with beer and takeaway – just scoots over on the couch and curls up against him the way she does whenever they watch telly, whether it’s “soap night” or the airing of the BBC’s latest literary adaptation (the 2008 _Sense and Sensibility_ was rather good, he thinks; she prefers Gaskell’s _North and South_ with Richard Armitage, who _he_ thinks looks suspiciously like Phillip Turner from that one murder case about five years back).

And if he still likes to hiss in her ear about all the things _CSI: Miami_ gets wrong, well, at least he’s trying.

 **  
**

**_4.  He always tries to protect her from everything._ **

The first time he orders her out of the line of fire, she curses so impressively she has Winston blushing to the roots of his very curly hair, shoves him aside and charges out the door, only for him to yank her back and whisper furiously that she is the glue that holds his life together, and would she _please_ do him the courtesy of keeping herself safe so he doesn’t have to worry about her _and_ the suspect’s knife at the same time, because he’d only be able to think of her anyway, and she didn’t _really_ want him dead, did she?

She returns the volley with a long-winded rant that boils down to “I am your fucking _partner_ , dammit, and where you go I go. No exceptions, you pompous windbag! If you think you’re going in there alone, I’m having you committed!”

When she saves his life by taking down an armed suspect barehanded, he gulps audibly, summons up his courage and mutters the three hardest words in any variant of the English language, living or extinct.

“What’s that?” she asks gleefully, as she cups her hand to her ear.

“YOU WERE RIGHT!” he bellows, red-faced, and she laughs so hard she has to wrap her arms around her ribs to keep them from cracking.

He has no choice but to kiss her then, because she’s rarely more beautiful than when she’s flushed and radiant with mirth.

He still always tries to order her out of the line of fire, but he always gives in, because she’d never stay behind, and if she were the kind of person who would stay when ordered, he wouldn’t have lasted thirty days with her, let alone fallen in love with her.

But he always worries.

 

 **_5.  He’s a snob._ **

She loves the man, she honestly does – but it must be said. Thomas Lynley is a snob of the worst order.

How that happened she will never know – God knows his mother doesn’t stand on ceremony, and neither does that lovely sister of his – but it happened.

“Could it have happened at Oxford?” she asks Lady Asherton – she refuses to use the title, claiming it belongs to his mother and preferring the much simpler “Sergeant Lynley” – as they’re sipping spiked cider around the fire at Christmastime.

“Oh no,” chimes in Judith from her armchair, “it started at Eton. Remember, mother? He came home for winter hols insisting that he was going to be a Lord someday, and he should act like it.”

Barbara immediately lets loose with a peal of laughter, and she can see Lady Asherton smothering her own chuckle with her hand as Judith grins the universal, wicked grin of a sister sharing her brother’s secrets.

“What’s all this?” The man in question appears in the doorway, stamping his feet and brushing the snowflakes from his coat.

“Your lovely wife is on to you, Tommy.”

“Oh really? Why am I not getting the benefit of this, then?”

Barbara blushes bright red at that, but Lady Asherton quells him with a look of utter disdain.

“It appears Barbara has learned what we have always tried to conceal. You’re a snob, Tommy.”

“I most certainly am not!” His indignant squeak sends Barbara into paroxysms of laughter. “You have me eating takeaway on nights we’re not working, watching soap operas – watching American crime dramas, for God’s sake, and inaccurate ones at that!”

“I’m not the one who shows up in the den with beer and food at precisely ten p.m., love!”

Now Lynley’s the one blushing.

“He mocks my romance novels!”

“She flatly refuses to read intelligent literature!”

“I read Austen!”

“Have you ever so much as heard of Dostoyevsky?”

“Oh, him. He was the boring, long-winded Russian, yeah? The bane of A-levels the country over.”

“He was one of the greatest writers of all time!”

“Tell me, have you ever read anything for _fun?_ ”

“Of course I have!”

“That wasn’t case files or Wodehouse?”

He shuts his mouth with an audible snap.

Meanwhile, his mother and sister are laughing so hard they have tears streaming down their cheeks. “Well done, Barbara,” cried Judith, “it’s been years since someone put Tommy in his place like that! Tell me, Tommy, what prompted you to look past your aristocratic nose and snatch this one up before she got away?”

Lynley sobers abruptly, exchanging a meaningful glance with Barbara. She nods slightly; he can tell them.

“She stuck,” he says simply. “I raged at her, insulted her and looked down on her, punished her for my own guilt and treated her like dirt, and still she stuck. And one day I realized that I didn’t know what I’d do if she walked away. Without my even noticing it she became the central pillar of my life. And I finally saw the truth: that she was more essential to me than breath, and that there was no one, could be no one, who could be to me what she was, what she had always been. And, thank God, she said yes.”

Lady Asherton’s eyes are brimming with tears. Judith looks so proud of her brother, she could burst.  And Barbara – Barbara simply rises and walks over to her partner, her best friend, her everything – her earth and sky – and lets him fold her into his arms as he presses a long, fervent, grateful kiss to her hair.

“Not such a snob after all,” whispers Lady Asherton.

“No,” murmurs Barbara from the warmth of Lynley’s arms, her voice brimming with unconditional love. “Not so much.”

 

 **_+1. He always backs her up, even when he thinks she’s wrong._ **

Hillier scowls at both of them impartially.

“Are you telling me, Inspector Lynley, that you would have taken an identical course of action to that of DS Lynley had you arrived before she did?”

“I am, sir. DS Lynley’s actions displayed every bit of the compassion, talent for her job and dedication to duty for which she has consistently been known and commended. Had she not taken the course of action she did, three people would have died – including two children.” Lynley’s face is impassive.

“And are you telling me, Inspector, that you _approve_ of DS Havers’ – I’m sorry, DS Lynley’s –course of action, by which I mean dashing into a burning house containing an armed suspect and two hostages with no backup and no gun?”

“Of course not, sir. I have every intention of turning her over my knee as soon as we get home.”

Barbara chokes a little at that and does her best to disguise the unmistakable flush of arousal that creeps up her neck – she hadn’t expected that, now why was it so arousing? – while Hillier looks faintly sick. “Out, both of you. We’ll say no more about this. DS Lynley, if you so much as consider going into a hostile situation without backup again, I will transfer you to the other side of London, the consequences to my solve rates be damned. Are we clear? Good. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and try to forget what I’ve just heard, most likely with the help of copious amounts of alcohol.”

Lynley does, in fact, turn her over his knee when they get home – but as Barbara could have predicted, it doesn’t have quite the effect he’d intended, since by the time he finishes with her she’s soft and wet and crying his name, and he’s muffling curses against her shoulder and swearing that if she ever gets herself killed, he’ll kill her himself.

Much later, when they’re curled in bed, she asks, “Did you mean what you said to Hillier, that you would have done the same thing?”

“Yes,” he says, without hesitation. “I did.”

“But you still think it was wrong.”

“Of course I do, Barbara! It nearly got you killed!”

“And yet you still stood up for me.” Her tone is equal parts bafflement and curiosity.

“Of course I did. When you came out of that house I wasn’t sure whether to ravish you or turn you over my knee right there.  Barbara, what you did was bloody stupid. But I fell in love with the woman who would dash into a burning house and not think twice about it. Of course I stood behind you. I always have. I always will.”

He doesn’t miss the prick of tears in her eyes at his words, and when she kisses him, he eases her back on the sheets and gently, tenderly, quiets her confused murmur with his lips before he sinks her into a warm pool of arousal so exquisite, it’s all she can do to stay conscious.

 _This must be what it’s like to drown_ , she thinks as the pleasure floods her, and then she surrenders herself unconditionally to the magic of his touch.

As always, he holds her all through the night; and when she wakes in the morning and looks into his eyes, she knows all over again that even if she could, there isn’t an instant she would choose to change.


End file.
